SmogRank / History / Country race
Countries, worst air first, day by day
Each country's typical measured city over the 30 days to every day since January 2023, worst first. Press Play to watch the order change, or drag the slider to any day.
The worst countries for PM2.5 over the 7 days to 19 Feb 2023: North Macedonia 58.1 µg/m³, Slovenia 41.6 µg/m³ and Romania 36.3 µg/m³.
- 1North Macedonia11 cities58.1
- 2Slovenia8 cities41.6
- 3Romania7 cities36.3
- 4Bosnia and Herzegovina4 cities32.3
- 5Greece10 cities25.4
- 6Slovakia33 cities24.4
- 7Italy32 cities, was 922.8
- 8Croatia3 cities22.2
- 9Poland68 cities21.2
- 10Belgium35 cities20.1
- 11France129 cities19.6
- 12The Netherlands25 cities18.7
- 13Czechia36 cities17.8
- 14Spain92 cities14.6
- 15Austria17 cities14.3
- 16Germany170 cities12.6
- 17Norway17 cities11.5
- 18Portugal8 cities10.3
- 19Latvia4 cities9.7
- 20United States420 cities6.8
+ 3 more countries, 5.3 µg/m³ and below
Not counted on this day, too few cities measured: Lithuania since 18 Feb 2023, Kosovo since 5 Feb 2023, Australia since 4 Feb 2023 and 21 more countries. Days missing from the source archive fall in this window, so fewer countries are counted.
Countries counted each day
A country's number is its typical measured city: the median of its cities' means over the 30 days (a city needs 21 of them measured; 5 of 7 on the 7-day race), shown only with 3 such cities. A country whose monitors go quiet fades out where it stood rather than sliding down, so a gap never reads as cleaner air; "was" beside a city count marks a month after many cities joined or left. Some large countries are thin or missing because their monitors' licences don't allow reuse. How we rank.
Not covered: the government monitoring networks of China and Turkey, which publish only on their own websites; we are building the readers for them. Most cities there are missing from this board, not clean. Why.